The bloom went off the rose about a year ago…I guess by now we’d have to say the rose has gone and died. From Entertainment Weekly:
President Obama’s speech viewership keeps on slipping.
Monday night’s policy address on Libya delivered 25.6 million viewers, continuing the president’s trend of declining ratings for his issue-oriented telecasts.
The speech was down 12% from Obama’s address on Iraq last August (29.2 million), which fell 9% from his speech on the Gulf Coast oil spill in June (32.1 million), which in turn dropped 21% from his Afghanistan speech back in December of 2009 (40.8 million). Last night’s address could have been dinged by starting slightly before primetime, at 7:30 p.m. (which also kept Obama from making ABC choose between the commander-in-chief and airing Dancing With the Stars at its usual time)…
It is, however, mighty disturbing that the considered decision here was that a completely mindless and worthless show is more important than a Presidential speech about war. I mean, come on, I don’t like Obama as President but he still rates higher in the importance sweepstakes than some bit of television trash.
Aside from that, this tends to confirm my view that the people are tuning him out. Each time he says “let me be clear” the American people hear “let me try to snow you”, and so they are just not paying attention. I have to admit, also, that I only managed to hear the speech by accident – it happened to come on just as I was driving home from work and preempted my normal drive-time radio show (and I missed the first few minutes because I was finishing up my normal drive-time Rosary, done each commute home before flipping on the radio). So, I guess I’m guilty, too. But it is hard to listen to him these days – in fact, it is a bit excruciating when you listen to his words and then bounce them off the reality of the situation and swiftly conclude that the man either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about what is going on.
Forget all the polling and punditry about 2012 – its all wrong. While we still have to rate Obama as the likely winner, we only do that now because it is always so hard to beat an incumbent President. But Obama is very much yesterday’s news for the American people. He has nothing more to say to us that we’re interested in hearing…all the GOP need do is find a credible alternative to him, and he’s beaten next year.
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